Friday, December 31, 2010

The second amendment community has lost a champion. Aaron S. Zelman Executive Director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership passed away December 21, 2010

He is survived by his wife Nancy, two sons, Erik and Jeremy. Funeral services were held at 11am December 24, 2010 at the Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue, 2909 W. Mequon Rd., Mequon. Memorials can be made to JPFO, P.O. Box 270143, Hartford, WI 53027.

Aaron was often interviewed by Alex Jones on his radio show and was a no nonsense voice for protecting and defending our second amendment. He would often speak in favor of a Bill of Rights Culture for all Americans and of the need for people to get involved.

While JPFO is known for its posters and articles supporting gun rights, it was Aaron’s work in exposing the connection between our 1968 Gun Control Act and the 1938 Nazi gun control laws in “Gun Control: Gateway to Tyranny” that brought JPFO to the attention of most gun owners.

Dec. 13: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas gestures as he speaks during a meeting of Fatah's executive committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

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Published December 31, 2010

Associated Press

JERUSALEM – The Palestinian president said a new attempt by the Palestinians to get the United Nations to condemn Israeli settlements was specifically designed to win U.S. support.

As part of a new emphasis on winning international support for their cause, the Palestinians have drafted a proposal and are lobbying for a Security Council resolution that would declare West Bank settlements illegal and an "obstacle to peace."

The U.S. has said it doesn't support the move, but it remains unclear if it will veto the measure or abstain should the draft come to a vote. Israel says it is an attempt by the Palestinians to avoid negotiations.

Speaking on Thursday to Palestinian expatriates and Arab ambassadors in Brazilia, Brazil, President Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinian draft used language similar to that used by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has criticized settlements.

This time it is not the mobile shock troops of Nazi Panzer divisions storming into the countries of Easter Europe, it is a group of pin-striped international bankers operating out of a black glass building in Basel Switzerland.
And it is we Americans that are now under foreign control. The mere fact that you haven’t seen the blood-torn bodiesdoes not mean the invasion was any less successful. The carefully crafted financial crisis was all that was needed
Bank Of International Settlements Offices:
Like a stealth computer virus covertly morphing into your hard drive, the enemy, aided by its divisions on Wall Street has taken control of our very financial lives without a single shot being fired.
Sounds conspiratorial doesn’t it?

But whether it is a conspiracy or not, is not the point – the details of the coup, it’s planning and execution, are spelled out in my book, Crisis by Design.

In an earlier postyou learned that the International Bank of Settlements’ “Financial Stability Board” (FSB) was given power over the U.S. financial system when Barack Obama signed an agreement along with other members of the G-20, creating what they have called a Global Monetary Authority. Never mind that Congress is required to approve (or reject) such agreements, they aren’t even looking. The anti-virus software has been disabled by lobbyist with checkbooks – the ultimate power to persuade for many on the Hill.

The government is like a human body with no immune response, and the miraculous medicine to cure the disease – the Constitution – is a ghost of its former self. Lacking its defense by those very lawmakers who are sworn to uphold its tenants, the Constitution is alike on life support.

The President? A facilitator of the coup.
Congress? Addicted to debt like a junkie on Horse.
The American people? Mostly in the dark. Few know that the fiscal autonomy of this country has, to a large degree, been dished off to a handful of bankers in who fly into Basel, Switzerland every couple of months for board meetings behind very closed doors.

Few know that the agreement signed by the President on April 2, 2009, gives the FSB the obligation to dictate to member countries (of which we are one) “specification of the structure and functions of government”.

Go ahead, read it again.
Washington is oblivious to this situation. It is our job, our duty, our responsibility to wake them up and get them to act.

What you can DO:
In the U.S. a body like the FSB must be confirmed either by treaty or Congressional Executive Agreement. This treaty or Congressional Executive Agreement would serve as a vehicle to create a legislative oversight and enforcement body over the FSB.

1.) Write to your U.S. senators and congressperson.
2.) Refer to the communiqué from the Bank of International Settlements signed by president Obama in London on April 2, 2009.
3.) Demand that they classify that agreement as a “treaty” with a foreign power. (This would require 2/3rds vote majority to become the Rule of Law in the USA). Lacking that, it needs to be classified as a Congress Executive Agreement.
4.) Demand that Congress hold open, public hearings on the treaty / agreement for debate.
5.) If you are aware of this situation, take the time and responsibility to do so. If not my book, do your own research as to what has really happened and educate your dearest friends and family. You have everything to lose by remaining uneducated about this situation, and, thus, quiet about it. The international bankers are counting on that!
6.) Keep your powder dry. Image credit: www.prisonplanet.com

The holiday brought bittersweet news: unless the Transportation Security Authority disbands, I'll never see a certain friend of mine again. His long-term unemployment finally ended, and next month, he starts a great new job. But it's in Texas, too far to drive; from my place in Connecticut to his new home in San Antonio is 2,000 miles – 500 more than separates London from Moscow.

As an American – that is, someone considered lucky to get seven consecutive days off work – the only way I could possibly travel such distance is to fly. But flying includes the legal obligation I submit to having my genitalia groped by some TSA thug wearing the same latex gloves already shoved down nine dozen other strangers' underwear. There's only two ways an American flyer can reliably avoid this: be rich enough to buy your own plane, or a high-ranking congressman or other VIP exempt from the indignities they inflict upon ordinary citizens.

The TSA agent used her hands to feel under and between my breasts. She then rammed her hand up into my crotch until it jammed into my pubic bone ... I was touched in the pubic region in between my labia ... She then moved her hand across my pubic region and down the inner part of my upper thigh to the floor. She repeated this procedure on the other side. I was shocked and broke into tears.

A woman named Chris said:

"In the four times she explored the area where my inner thigh met my crotch, she touched my labia each time, and one pass made contact with my clitoris, through two layers of clothing. I told her I felt humiliated, assaulted and abused ... In my work as a nurse, if I did what the TSA did against a patient's will it would be considered assault and battery, and I did not see how the TSA should have different rules."

Recipients of such treatment aren't allowed to show distress. Melissa from Massachusetts did anyway:

"I was shaking and crying the entire time. I was begging them to hurry up but they kept stopping and telling me to calm down. It is impossible to gain composure when a stranger has her hands in your underwear."

I couldn't. I know my limits: can't sprout wings and fly, spin straw into gold, or ooze obedience toward anyone who'd treat me as the TSA treats Melissa, Mary, Chris and countless others. And once I said something rude – even an obscenity-free comment like "Have fun on your knees, sniffing my crotch like the dog that you are" [see top photo] – I'd be arrested on terrorism charges and the media would run sympathetic stories about poor TSA agents disliked for merely following orders. Self-described patriots would say "Disrespecting authority is unAmerican" and recommend harsh punishment for me.

There's no logical consistency backing TSA policies. On Christmas eve, it added insulated Thermos bottles to its extra-scrutiny list, not after learning of some beverage-container plot but because a bureaucrat thought, "A terrorist could, maybe, I dunno, do bad stuff with one." The Thermos-threat article said the TSA's usual ban on more than 3.4 ounces of liquid still applies. This surprised me because last time I flew, in 2006, regulations only allowed three ounces; the TSA, no doubt, claims sound, secret reasons why that four-tenths of an ounce of shampoo stopped being dangerous.

DOHA: Top officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA, and many officials keep visiting US embassies in their respective countries voluntarily to establish links with this key US intelligence agency, says Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks.

“These officials are spies for the US in their countries,” Assange told Al Jazeera Arabic channel in an interview yesterday.

The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA.

Assange or Mansour, however, didn’t disclose the names of these officials. The WikiLeaks founder said he feared he could be killed but added that there were 2,000 websites that were ready to publish the remaining files that are in possession of WikiLeaks after “he has been done away with”.

“If I am killed or detained for a long time, there are 2,000 websites ready to publish the remaining files. We have protected these websites through very safe passwords,” said Assange.

Currently, his whistle-blowing website is exposing files in a ‘responsible’ manner, he claimed. “But if I am forced we could go to the extreme and expose each and every file that we have access to,” thundered the WikiLeaks founder. “We must protect our sources at whatever cost. This is our sincere concern.”
Some Arab countries even have torture houses where Washington regularly sends ‘suspects’ for ‘interrogation and torture’, he said.

WikiLeaks is receiving sensitive files from Afghanistan, Kenya, Russia and China, among other countries. For nine years the US and Nato forces have failed to silence people in Afghanistan because the people there are loyal and truthful. The US marines fighting in Afghanistan are not happy being there and don’t really know why they are there and fighting for what, said Assange.The US is trying to use latest technology to disrupt his website but in vain.

“Washington is also projecting me as a terrorist and wants to convince the world that I am another Osama bin Laden,” he said. According to Assange, he will be put on a trial for his various expose in a special court in London from January 11, 2011 and this court deals with terror-related cases.

“If the UK (where I am based right now) decides to hand me over to Sweden for alleged cases of sexual abuse, they (Stockholm) would hand me over to the US,” he said. Assange said he feared that the US might slap laws declaring him as a spy who had been acting against Washington. The Pentagon has set up a ‘war room’ manned by 120 officials and their job is just to disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks, he said.

“We have more files dealing with defense issues of Central Europe, but I or my staff didn’t have the time to go through all of them.” What is being published by the five media partners of WikiLeaks are publishing only those details which they think are interesting for their readers. There are some Arab officials who are ‘stealing’ oil of their countries.

“We need these media partners to focus more on this issue,” Assange said in this extensive, interesting and last version of his interface with Doha-based Aljazeera. US embassies around the world are very anxious about Israel, Iran, Labour unions, arms dealings (mainly selling of American arms), and spying through high-tech devices.

The America of Kennedy’s day and the America of today are two different worlds.

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
December 30, 2010

Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News. Instead of informing citizens, Fox News informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News “no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state,” turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making “anti-American comments.”

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: “youare with us or against us.”

“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse “and sometimes even anger public opinion.”

When people talk about the credit bubble they typically refer to the housing bubble and the trillions of dollars of debt secured by real estate. Yet the credit bubble also applies to student loans, government debt, and those pesky wallet hugging credit cards.

The American economy has embraced credit cards as quickly as apple pie or a weekend picnic at the park. During this holiday season many people pulled out the plastic and loaded up on debt to face a hefty bill come 2011. While banks have generously gorged at the taxpayer bailout trough, they have slowly put a tourniquet on the amount of credit Americans can access.

In other words banks have applied standards to American consumers that they are not willing to adhere to themselves. The total amount of credit card debt outstanding has contracted vigorously since the debt crisis emerged.

A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals' names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government's ability to thwart an attack in the United States.

The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government's system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab's father had told U.S. officials of his son's radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person's name on the watch list.

Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list.

But civil liberties groups argue that the government's new criteria, which went into effect over the summer, have made it even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in the nation's security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel.

"They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they're on," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Officials from 18 countries held an impromptu, late-night meeting earlier this month at the United Nations office in Geneva, and made a decision that rattled Internet technocrats around the world.

Autocratic governments like China and Iran attended the meeting, as did several democratic ones. Despite protests by Portugal and the United States, they voted to staff a working group on the future of the Internet Governance Forum -- an important theatre of discussion on matters of cyberspace -- by governments alone.
The seemingly arcane move reverberated through a community of technical experts, academics and civil society groups who felt they had been unfairly excluded.

Fourteen technical organizations that help oversee how cyberspace runs wrote an open letter asking the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) to reverse its decision. Meanwhile the Internet Society, an umbrella group that helps manage technical standards online, posted a petition to its website in protest.

"A significant fuss has been kicked up about it," said Byron Holland, president and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the .ca domain.

Even Google waded into the fray. Vint Cerf, a vice-president at the online behemoth and one of the pioneers of the Internet, added his name to the petition, alongside 2,600 others. He also attacked the UN decision in a Dec. 17 blog post on Google's website.

"We don't believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance," Cerf wrote. "The current bottoms-up, open approach works -- protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation. Let's fight to keep it that way."

Eleven days later the UNCSTD buckled under the pressure, according to the Internet Society, and agreed to include up to 20 non-governmental groups.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.

Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery.

"Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night.

"There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults – more. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."
New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."

American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.

Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a possible downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. Lisbon was downgraded by rival agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year, while the borrowings of Naples and Budapest are on the brink of junk status. Istanbul's debt has already been downgraded to junk.

From the very beginning of QE2, it was no secret the Federal Reserve wanted the stock market to rise. The Fed got its wish. Many people see the stock market increase of nearly 20% in a few short months as a sign things are turning around. The turnaround is really a mirage of the printing press. Even so, some pundits think the economy is on the mend. Maritime News reported last week, “It has been successful,” Peter Hooper, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in New York, said of Bernanke’s policy of pumping money into the financial system, dubbed QE2. “It’s contributed to the rally in the stock market” and has “been important in reducing substantially the downside risk of deflation.” (Click here for the complete story.) Pumping money into the stock market to get stocks to go up is not the same as hiring people and making products so share prices grow. With the stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.8% (or more than 22% according to Shadowstats.com), this is just one of the dismal facts of this economy. Other gloomy indicators are the million plus foreclosures this year and next. The auto industry just had its fourth month of decline in new orders. The FDIC has shut down 157 banks so far this year, and all the banks look solvent only because of rule changes that amount to government sanctioned accounting fraud. You cannot have the banks, housing and auto sales all tanking at the same time and expect the party to last.
For the life of me, I cannot see how share prices going up are going to get businesses hiring again. This stock market rally is good for one group of people—insiders. They are selling at a rate of more than 80 to 1 over buyers. It is obvious this market is not growing organically but is simply being pumped. Now, people should look out for the dump. Will the market continue to rise? Will there be QE 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or to infinity? Is printing money the true road to wealth and prosperity? I think you know where I’m going.

(NaturalNews) Of all the talk about S.510, virtually no one has actually read the language in the bill -- especially not those lawmakers who voted for it. The more you read from this bill, the more surreal it all becomes. For example, did you know there's a global FDA power grab agenda hidden in the Food Safety Modernization Act? Keep reading and I'll quote text straight out of the bill itself.

SEC. 308. FOREIGN OFFICES OF THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION.(a) IN GENERAL. - The Secretary shall establish offices of theFood and Drug Administrationin foreign countries selected by the Secretary.

It then goes on to say:

(a) The Secretary shall, not later than 2 years of the date of enactment of this Act, develop a comprehensive plan to expand the technical, scientific, and regulatory food safety capacity of foreign governments, and their respectivefoodindustries, from whichfoodsare exported to theUnited States.

Huh? TheFDAis now going to run the food safety programs of foreign governments? Look out, world: I'm from the FDAand I'm here to help!

So who is involved in creating this? Believe it or not, the global "food safety" plan is to be developed under consultation to the Department of Homeland Security as well as the U.S. Treasury. As the bill states:

(b) Consultation - In developing the plan under subsection (a), the Secretary shall consult with the Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the United States Trade Representative, and the Secretary of Commerce, representatives of the foodindustry, appropriate foreigngovernmentofficials, nongovernmental organizations that represent the interests of consumers, and other stakeholders.

You might reasonably wonder "What does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with the FDA's food safety plan?" Or "Why is the U.S. Treasury involved in thefood supply?" Learn more about the Federal Reserve and you'll have the answers to these questions. I don't have space for all the details here, but read Ed Griffin's book and visit http://www.realityzone.com/if you really want to know what's behind a lot of this.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

As many as 98 banks, which took in a total of $4.2 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), may fail anyway, according to a study of third quarter earnings by the Wall Street Journal. Although the federal government originally promised to use TARP funds only to help healthy banks, the Wall Street Journal’s study tells a rather different tale. The banks in question are hamstrung by “eroding capital levels, a pileup of bad loans and warnings from regulators,” much of them stemming from risky commercial real estate loans gone sour.
Also significant is that most of the banks on the list are small, averaging $439 million in assets. The Wall Street mega-banks are once again flush with cash — but then, many of those privileged institutions, numbered among the Federal Reserve’s “primary dealers” with whom open market operations are conducted, have had direct access to Federal Reserve funds via the Fed’s new Primary Dealer Credit Facility and Term Securities Lending Facility. Goldman-Sachs, for instance, a primary dealer that has made enormous profits during the financial crisis, had more than $75 billion by the end of the third quarter and has paid back all its government loans.

“These are Obama's objectives,” Limbaugh explained on his show. “He said this during the campaign. He wants to reduce and eliminate nuclear arsenals, and he'll start with ours.”

The president is just following through on his campaign promises, Limbaugh says. “He vowed to get rid of our missile defense. Everybody knows the Russians don't live up to agreements. This is not about the Russians. This is about us.”

Democrats have found their enemy, and it is us, Limbaugh says. To Democrats, “the focus of evil in the modern world is the United States,” he says. “Our nuclear arsenal makes us the lone superpower. We represent the threat. We represent the focus of evil.”

As for Obama, “he's just fulfilling a lifelong dream of the Democrat Party and the American left and the worldwide left, and he's got the votes to do it,” Limbaugh says.

Limbaugh is none too happy with Republicans who backed START. He cites a column from Andrew McCarthy in National Review to illustrate his case: "As is too often the case, Republican senators are taking their foreign-affairs cues from John McCain and Richard Lugar, leaders of the caucus’s moderate wing -- which is to say, its incoherent wing," McCarthy writes.

"The Senate is pretending that it has the authority to rewrite a treaty, while the president pretends that the unacceptable treaty can be fixed by writing letters to the senators who need courting rather than writing a new treaty with Russian leaders who need convincing."

Getting back to Limbaugh, he says, “It's inexplicable all these Republicans helping out.”

The upshot is a mess, he points out. “It is not helpful to the United States, it's helpful to our enemies, but this is the status quo for the Democrat Party, folks. The Democrat Party [has] always sided with the Soviet Union over America.”

The Washington Post today reports on the vast growing domestic spying apparatus that the federal government is using, in conjunction with the Pentagon, to target millions of law-abiding American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

In a lengthy report entitled “Monitoring America”, the Post details how a vast centralized snooping machine is being constructed and employed by local, state and federal agencies as well as military investigators, to collect, store and analyze swathes of personal information.

Everything contained within the Post’s article has already been reported and covered in depth by this website and others in the alternative media that have consistently warned of the threat of the exponential rise of the big brother spy system over the past decade.

The report details Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano’s recent “See something, say something” campaign, which encompasses the federal government hooking up with Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders to encourage citizens to file “suspicious activity reports” if they see any activity they think could be criminal or terroristic.

The government defines a suspicious activity as “observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity” related to terrorism.

As we reported recently, critics of the program have been literally dubbed insane by it’s coordinators, despite legitimate concerns over asking citizens to effectively spy on each other for the government.
The Washington Post report notes that such suspicious activity reports are just one piece of information being collected at the local and state levels and fed into a vast “Guardian” database via fusion centers, which ultimately connect to the FBI, the DHS and even the Department of Defense.

According to the report, the spook network includes 4,058 federal, state and local organizations.Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cell phone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports.

Dozens of the fusion centers were created after 9/11 to identify potential threats and “improve the way information is shared”. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies.
The centers have received billions in funding from the Department of Homeland Security and also work in conjunction with the military arm of the DHS, NORTHCOM.

They also have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, employment history, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.
Some of these data-brokers, such as one in Maryland called Entersect, claim to hold records about 98 percent of Americans.

continued America's permanent war agenda by expanding imperial adventurism, increasing covert and overt aggression on new fronts with out-of-control military spending, exceeding the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;

became the latest war criminal Nobel Peace Prize recipient;

executed his first successful coup d'etat in Honduras against its democratically elected president, then backed the fascist regime replacing him;

failed attempting regime change in Iran;

continued providing military, economic and political aid to the world's most ruthless, corrupt despots;

maintained a longstanding policy of supplying Israel with annual billions, more on request, other add-ons and extras, interest-free loans, the latest weapons, munitions and technology, unrestricted US market access, free entry of its immigrants, and unbridled support for its illegal belligerence, occupation, and crimes of war and against humanity;

presides over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus, sacrificing due process, judicial fairness, and other civil liberty protections in the name of national security;

continued torture as official policy, extraordinary rendition to prison hellholes, and for the first time, targeted US citizens for assassination;

invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits by victims of rendition, torture, abuse, and those opposing warrantless wiretapping;

targets whisleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, environmental and animal rights activists, anyone challenging state power, and civil rights lawyers who defend them too vigorously called terrorists or threats to national security;

endorsed preventive detention without charge for those at Guantanamo considered dangerous, but no evidence allows prosecuting them;

expanded Bush administration spying and secrecy;

refused to prosecute its officials, suppressing proof of their culpability;

planned cybersecurity tyranny, threatening a free and open Internet, consumer privacy, and civil liberties; more on how below;

waged war on organized labor through fewer jobs, less pay, reduced benefits, and gutted work rules, including health and safety on-the-job protections;

tried controlling the media more aggressively than Nixon;

denied budget-strapped states financial help, forcing them to slash welfare programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services when they're most needed;

continued to commodify public education, end government responsibility for it, and make it another business profit center;

promoted dangerous vaccines for a non-existent threat;

promoted health care legislation that rations care; enriches insurers, drug giants and large hospital chains; places profits above human need; and keeps a dysfunctional system in place; Peter Singer's July 15, 2009 New York Times article endorsed administration policy, headlined: "Why We Must Ration Health Care," saying it's essential to apportion a "scarce resource" to those who can afford it; others will get only what they can pay for;

on the pretext of improving food safety, enacted agribusiness-friendly House legislation, harming consumers, small farms and food producers without improving America's industrial food system; on November 30, the Senate passed its own version; more on that below;

wants so far not passed legislation to let corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by raising energy cost, while creating a speculative bonanza through a new carbon trading derivatives scheme;

cracks down harder on undocumented immigrants than George Bush, deporting a record number in FY 2010; others are held in over 300 detention facilities in nearly every state in the country, treated like criminals or terrorists; and

promoted a national ID card for all citizens and legal residents to be able to monitor them everywhere at all times.

Year two: Obama's destructive agenda continued.

Militarizing and Exploiting Haiti
An earlier article explained that Haiti is no stranger to adversity. Except for a brief time after its successful 1791 - 1803 revolution turning slaves into citizens and during Jean-Bertrand Aristide's tenure, it's experienced over 500 years of severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, occupation, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities from destructive hurricanes to powerful earthquakes, most recently on January 12. It devastated greater Port-au-Prince, killing up to 300,000, leaving around 1.5 million Haitians homeless with little aid and no help to rebuild.

Some countries reacted quickly, mostly a few Latin American ones, including Cuba and Venezuela. Washington did nothing, deploying marines and paratroupers instead, militarizing the country, obstructing, not providing aid, promising $1.1 billion, delivering none, planning only exploitation of Haiti's resources and cheap labor.
Haiti was opened for business, occupied to be plundered, its people on their own, sink or swim under circumstances assuring mass suffering, starvation, disease and for many, death. Only corporate interests mattered at a time of dire need.

Eleven months later, Haiti is still plagued by rubble everywhere, extreme deprivation, promised aid undelivered, none from Washington, 1.5 million without shelter in streets and other open spaces, and now raging cholera, and the aftermath of a sham election, institutionalizing coup d'etat rule.

Washington's imperial hand orchestrated it, denying Haitians any chance for real change. It represents another betrayal by a president showing contempt for essential needs, human rights, and basic freedoms, at home and abroad, even under the most dire conditions.

Carpenters work on a home under construction in Garner, North Carolina. Photographer: Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg

By Bob Willis - Dec 28, 2010Bloomberg.com

Home prices dropped more than forecast in October, a sign housing will remain a weak link as the U.S. recovery accelerates into the new year.

The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values fell 0.8 percent from October 2009, the biggest year-over-year decline since December 2009, the group said today in New York. The decrease exceeded the0.2 percent drop projected by the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

A wave of foreclosures waiting to reach the market means home prices will remain under pressure in 2011, representing a risk to household finances. Federal Reserve policy makers this month said “depressed” housing and high unemployment remained constraints on consumer spending, reasons why they reiterated a plan to expand record monetary stimulus.

“We’ll remain in negative territory for several more months,” said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York, who forecast a year-on-year drop of 1.3 percent. “The housing market does remain weak and none of the recent data suggest a substantial pickup.”

After retreating briefly, stock-index futures remained higher after the report as a jump in holiday sales boosted the outlook for consumer spending. The contract on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index maturing in March rose 0.2 percent to 1,255.5 at 9:23 a.m. in New York. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note rose to 3.36 percent from 3.33 percent late yesterday.

President Barack Obama’s unsustainable near-term fiscal policies are now preamble to the massive and longstanding long-term fiscal problems highlighted in the Bowles–Simpson Commission report, the Domenici–Rivlin report, and elsewhere. As Europe in similar straits is now demonstrating that, in the immortal words of Herb Stein, “what cannot go on forever won’t.”

The preferred solution to excessive deficits for those favoring big government is to turn to a value-added tax (VAT) for additional revenues. In making their case for a VAT, proponents often cite economic advantages of a VAT over an income tax as though the policy was to substitute the VAT for income tax rather than add the VAT. For example, one argument often raised in favor of the VAT is that it would improve the level of private saving. But given that the VAT is being proposed in addition to the income tax rather than as a substitute for it, this argument is flat-out false.

The Fiscal Problem Is Very Real
Federal budget deficits both near- and long-term are unsustainable, a point on which there is finally broad agreement. Something has to give. Either federal spending will be cranked down (as many new incoming Members of Congress are suggesting) from its now-bloated levels of around 25 percent of our economy to a more traditional 20 percent, or federal taxes must soar. For example, if the 2010 budget deficit were reduced entirely through tax increases to long-run sustainable levels, then even if the economy suffered no harm as a result, taxes would need to rise by about $750 billion a year.

In fact, this magnitude of tax increase would be devastating to America’s businesses and families. It is also almost surely beyond the revenue-raising capacity of our current tax system, which is why big government’s defenders are focusing so heavily on the adoption of a European-style VAT as a new, additional revenue source. The Domenici–Rivlin plan, for example, includes a new European-style VAT, though in a bow to the opposition that such a tax has traditionally garnered in the United States, they tried to disguise it by quaintly calling it a Deficit Reduction Sales Tax. A rose by any other name …

Galileo was the first to describe the amazing fact that, apart from air resistance, all objects fall at the same "rate." If you have not experienced this fact directly, try dropping a large rock and a pebble side-by- side. The rate we are referring to is not a "speed," because for a falling object the speed is constantly changing. The rate we are talking about is actually the "rate of increase of speed," how quickly the speed builds up, called acceleration. The acceleration achieved by all falling bodies, apart from air resistance, is called the "acceleration of gravity."

Gravity causes freely falling objects to increase their speed by about 32 ft/s per second. (The awkward unit, feet per second per second is commonly abbreviated ft/s2.) When an object is dropped, the speed is initially zero, but it immediately starts speeding up. After 1 second its speed will be 32 ft/s. After 2 seconds its speed will be 64 ft/s. Etc. 32 ft/s2 is an approximation. The "acceleration of gravity" actually varies slightly from place to place. In New York City it is 32.159 ft/s2.

The dollar weakened against 15 of its 16 major counterparts and sank 0.5 percent to $1.3233 per euro. Photographer: Hannelore Foerster/Bloomberg

By Shiyin Chen and Anna KitanakaDec 28, 2010

Most Asian stocks declined and the dollar fell on concern China will further raise interest rates and before the release of U.S. data that may show that housing remains a weak link amid a strengthening economic recovery.

About three stocks slid for every two that rose on the MSCI Asia Pacific Index, which climbed 0.2 percent to 135.66 as of 5 p.m. in Tokyo. Benchmark indexes in Hong Kong and Shanghai dropped at least 0.9 percent. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index added 0.2 percent and futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index gained 0.1 percent. The dollar weakened against 14 of its 16 major counterparts and sank 0.4 percent to $1.3213 per euro. Copper rallied as much as 0.6 percent to a record in New York.

The Shanghai Composite Index extended its longest losing streak since July after People’s Bank of China adviser Li Daokui said in a newspaper interview that adjustments in rates and reserve requirements are “very necessary” in 2011. Data today may show U.S. home prices fell in October while consumer confidence improved this month.

“The global economy is recovering, but as a backdrop there’s the China overheating concern because it’s still unable to be controlled,” said Danny Yan, a Hong Kong-based fund manager at Haitong International Asset Management, which oversees about $400 million.

China Resources Land Ltd. fell 3.3 percent, pacing a 0.9 percent decline in the Hang Seng Index as Hong Kong’s stock market reopened after a holiday. The Shanghai Composite sank 1.7 percent, adding to a 1.9 percent drop yesterday after the People’s Bank of China boosted its key one-year lending and deposit rates by 25 basis points over the weekend.

How long before you will be subjected to a virtual strip search before you can buy food or other necessities?

﻿

﻿ Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 27, 2010

As we predicted, Homeland Security and national security state officialdom are in the process of expanding the police state and citizen humiliation grid from airports to hotels and shopping malls.

“The United States is stepping up security at ‘soft targets’ like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday,” reports AFP.
“We look at so-called soft targets — the hotels, shopping malls, for example — all of which we have reached out to in the past year and have done a fair amount of training for their own employees,” DHS boss Janet Napolitano said.

Big Sis Napolitano knows the government’s “See Something, Say Something” program to acclimate citizens to a police and surveillance state designed to rival anything established by East Germany’s Stasi is more Big Brotherism.

“It just sounds very Big Brother to me, turning in the next door neighbor.” CNN’s Candy Crowley said to Napolitano during an interview on “State of the Union.”

Long-term unemployment and loss of jobless benefits have more residents seeking aid.

Dayton Daily News

By Cornelius Frolik, Staff

December 24, 2010

Ohio’s welfare rolls this year swelled to almost 100,000 families, the highest level in decade, as more people joined the ranks of the unemployed and some of the unemployed lost their jobless benefits.

Through September in the Miami Valley, the average number of families receiving monthly cash assistance was 10,768, an increase of 7.4 percent from 2009 and 34 percent from 2007, according to the most recent data available from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Ohio, the seventh most populous U.S. state, has the third largest number of welfare recipients in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Only California and New York have more.

Enduring unemployment and changes in eligibility requirements have caused the expansion of the cash-assistance program, said Deb Downing, Montgomery County Job and Family Services’ assistant director of social services and income support.

“We have a lot of new people who are coming in and seeing us,” Downing said. “The biggest thing has been the economy.”

WASHINGTON - The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been transformed into a global intelligence organisation with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

Created in 1973, the DEA has steadily built its international turf, an expansion primarily driven by the multinational nature of the drug trade but also by forces within the agency seeking a larger mandate.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organisations, offer glimpses of DEA agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

- In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the President to the American ambassador demanded that the DEA go after his political enemies: "I need help with tapping phones."

- In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended by the attorney-general's attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

- In Guinea, the country's biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the son of the President, and diplomats discovered that before the police were able to destroy a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

- Leaders of Mexico's beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in their own country's police forces.

- Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict US sanctions, describe the drug agency's informants reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money as well as on the political activities of the junta's opponents.

Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the drug war do not offer large disclosures.

Rather, it is the details that add up to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the tricky game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually controlled by drug lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency operating in the shadows of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has become something more than a drug agency.

The DEA now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at arm's length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today's DEA has access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua's and Venezuela's, that have strained diplomatic relations with the US. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency's drug detection and wiretapping technologies.

In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, although victories have come at a high price, with scores of DEA informants as well as a handful of agents killed in Mexico and Afghanistan. The New York Times

Julian Assange

Assange claims he reluctantly signed book deals to keep WikiLeaks 'afloat'

Controversial WikiLeaks founder and chief Julian Assange (picture) has said he has signed book deals worth more than £1 million ($2 million) but not because he is cashing in on his notoriety.

Speaking to Britain'sSunday Times newspaper, Mr Assange said he has agreed to write his memoirs in order to keep his whistleblowing website "afloat" and for legal costs as he defends himself against sexual assault allegations in Sweden.

"I don't want to write this book but I have to," said Mr Assange, who is currently under house arrest in Britain as he fights Sweden's attempts to extradite him, with a full hearing in a London court due to start on Feb 7.

"I have already spent £200,000 on legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat."

Mr Assange confirmed he has signed deals with publishers in the United States and Britain which, together with deals from other markets and serialisations in newspapers, will net him about £1.1 million.

Friday, December 24, 2010

"Doubtful it stood, as two spent swimmers that do cling together, and choke their art." -Shakespeare, "Macbeth"

The Greek bailout was supposed to be an isolated case, a test of the European Union's (EU) ability to quarantine an infected member, preventing it from spreading "debt contagion."

But that was before Ireland failed. Ireland was the poster child for how to conduct a successful austerity program. Unlike the Greeks, who were considered profligate spendthrifts, the Irish did everything their creditors asked. The people sacrificed to pay for the excesses of their banks, but still the effort failed. Ireland was the second domino to fall to an International Monetary Fund (IMF)/EU bailout.

On December 17, Moody's Investors Service rewarded it for voting to accept the "rescue" package with a five-notch credit downgrade, from AA2 to BAA1, with warnings that further downgrades could follow.

Spain is rumored to be the next domino poised to fall. If it falls, it could bring down the EU.

Mac SlavoSHTF Plan
December 24, 2010
Millions of Americans who have been told that our economy is now in a period of recovery may be surprised to learn that most states are so broke that they are left with no other choice but to cut spending on literally everything. Governor Christie of New Jersey is, according to 60 Minutes, the canary in the mine:

We spent too much on everything. We spent money just crazily. The credit card’s maxed out. It’s over. It’s over.

Municipal Bonds are in meltdown mode, and Warren Buffet warned last June that as long as the Government is willing to step in and buy Muni Bonds, they will be considered AAA - otherwise it is uncertain what will become of them. Many States are in financial trouble as we see the U.S., like the Titanic in icy waters with its bowel scraping the proverbial Iceberg of debt.

Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital Inc. has stated that soon it looks like the Federal Reserve will be buying Muni Bonds as well, increasing the amount of money printing they have already started, which will lead to a further devaluing of the U.S. Dollar, and more National Debt., higher commodity and food prices,etc.

Soon, as the States go into deep deficits without the ability to pay their bills, the Federal government will follow, and the Federal Reserve will then be forced to purchase Muni Bonds to keep the ship afloat.

The life preservers needed right now by Americans, are the ones they provide for themselves - eliminating any debt they have, and the purchasing of gold and silver to save their wealth.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

President Barack Obama was outmaneuvered by the Russians and should have abandoned the New START negotiations instead of seeking a political victory, says former nuclear plans monitor Vice Admiral Jerry Miller, USN (Ret).
“The Obama administration is continuing a dated policy in which we cannot even unilaterally reduce our own inventory of weapons and delivery systems without being on parity with the Russians,” Miller told the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis, Md. “We could give up plenty of deployed delivery systems and not adversely affect our national security one bit, but New START prohibits such action - so we are now stuck with some outmoded and useless elements in our nuke force.”
After meeting resistance from several Republicans, the U.S. Senate ratified the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia by a vote of 71-26 on Wednesday.
“The Soviets/Russians were done in by Reagan and our missile defense program because they cannot afford to build such a system,” said Miller. “They instead try to counter our program with rhetoric at the bargaining table. And they won by outmaneuvering Obama. START plays right into their hands.”
Former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is often credited with bankrupting the U.S.S.R. because the Soviets were unable to keep pace with the technology being developed by the United States.
“We have always been superior in quality of our nuclear force, so we did not have to negotiate with a party we do not trust,” said Miller. “If Obama wanted to save some money and improve national defense, he should have gotten out of the nuke negations and acted unilaterally. START is simply a political victory for Obama.”
Miller, who helped prepare the National Strategic Target List and Single Integrated Operational Plan for waging nuclear war and later participated in arms control meetings with the Soviet government, expressed concern that START could leave the United States vulnerable to other emerging threats.
“The treaty prohibits the conversion of an existing ballistic missile system into a missile defense system,” said Miller. “We might want to do that with a Trident or an ICBM sometime in the future, particularly if the Chinese alleged threat materializes.”

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Most Corrupt States in U.S.

From bribery and kickbacks, to embezzlement and election crime, the American politician has been involved in them all. While some states with more politicians can be expected to have more corruption, as these graphics show it is not always the case.

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